Remembering Berkin Elvan: A wake-up call for Tayyip Erdogan?

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East. He attended the VUB in Brussels and did his graduate work at the universities of Essex and Oxford. In Oxford, Erimtan was a member of Lady Margaret Hall and he obtained his doctorate in Modern History in 2002. His publications include the book “Ottomans Looking West?” as well as numerous scholarly articles. In the period 2010-11, he wrote op-eds for Today’s Zaman and in the further course of 2011 he also published a number of pieces in Hürriyet Daily News. In 2013, he was the Turkey Editor of the İstanbul Gazette. He is on Twitter at @theerimtanangle

Last year Turkey went through its very own 'summer of discontent' as a result of opposition to the refurbishments planned (and now executed) in the wider Taksim area of the city of Istanbul.

Protests erupted locally, focused on the Gezi Park section
adjacent to the Taksim Square, and subsequently spread throughout
the rest of the city and even throughout the whole of the nation.

At the time, I made the following observation: "The
Guardian’s Richard Seymour ... rightly opines that these Gezi
Park protests have 'become a lightning conductor for all the
grievances accumulated against the [AKP] government'. Political
scientist and Gezi Park protester Koray Galıskan told the
international press “We do not have a government, we have Tayyip
Erdogan,” adding that “They are not listening to us ... This is
the beginning of a summer of discontent.”

The PM, displaying his usual swagger in the face of popular
opposition and confident of his apparently God-given popularity,
sufficed to declare on June 2, 2013, that "We cannot sit and
watch a few hooligans coming to the square and provoking people.
Because when the nation voted for us, they voted for us to guard
our history.”

In the course of that fateful summer a number of people were
injured or died as a result of the excessive force used by
Turkey's Security Forces: the Turkish Medical Association (TTB)
reported a total of 8,163 injured people (14 people lost an eye
as a result of being hit by either tear gas canisters or rubber
bullets) in addition to those who died. Their names have now
joined the ranks of earlier victims of political repression in
Turkey: Abdullah Cömert, aged 22, Ali İsmail Korkmaz, 19, Ethem
Sarısülük, 27, İrfan Tuna, 47, Zeynep Eryaşar, 55, Ahmet Atakan,
22; but also the name of the Police Commissioner Mustafa Sarı,
who died after a fall, should not be excluded.

In view of these sad names and figures, Amnesty International's
verdict that, "From the start of the Gezi Park protests the
Turkish authorities have – with isolated and brief exceptions –
displayed a blatant disregard for the right to peaceful assembly
as set out in international and national law.” And now, nine
months later, while the government is embroiled in a corruption
scandal of gigantic proportions, this "blatant
disregard" has led to yet another fatality, a 15-year-old
boy died on Tuesday, March 11.

"Berkin Elvan, then aged 14, was on his way to buy bread for
his family when he got caught up in the street battles in
Istanbul last June [2013]. He was hit in the head by a tear gas
cartridge fired by the police and had been in a coma ever
since,” as related by Constanze Letsch in the Guardian.

The deceased Berkin weighed just 16kg at the time of his death.
Emma Sinclair-Webb, Human Rights Watch's senior Turkey
researcher, declared recently that the "case of Berkin Elvan
has become a symbol for Turkey's record of police violence and
impunity.”

The boy's funeral cortege was held on Wednesday, and popular
grief was met by police repression and violence abounded (and
keeps abounding) throughout the whole of Turkey. Protesters
fought with riot police in at least 15 cities after the news of
the boy's death became public on Wednesday. Sinclair-Webb
observes correctly that the “enormous outpouring of anger at
these horrors is also due to the silence of the government on
Berkin Elvan's death and on this issue in general.”

Against the backdrop of this popular agitation throughout the
country, Turkey's erstwhile EU Minister Egemen Bagış made a
public announcement via Twitter, stating that "these
necrophiliacs" - referring to the protesters in support of
Berkin Elvan - will get their comeuppance on March 30. Bağış has
since removed this controversial tweet.

In contrast to his former minister, the generally quite vocal and
outspoken Erdogan has remained conspicuously silent. On Thursday
(March 13), while attending the opening of the Kızılay-Çayyolu
Metro line in Ankara, Tayyip Erdogan made an ever-so-slight
reference to the events now sweeping the country: "Yesterday,
they burned our election office in Istanbul ... They are
charlatans. They do not believe in the [ballot] box. And they
will see what is coming to them. As they have already now
recognized [what will happen to them on] March 30, they have said
let's create chaos and we might get [our] result with chaos. But
they won't.”

Selective grief?

The day of mourning and protest came to an end with the
announcement of another young person's death. Burak Can
Karamanoğlu died as a result of injuries sustained in the course
of an altercation which became a fight with deadly consequences
(on March 12).

Clearly shying away from directly pronouncing the dead boy
Elvan's name or even referring to the enormous outpouring of
grief throughout the whole of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan persists in
his usual dismissal of popular feelings of discontent with his
rule. Instead he urges his supporters to come out in numbers on
Election Day to teach the opposition a well-deserved lesson.

Taking his apparently polarizing discourse one step further, at a
meeting organized in Aksaray on Thursday, Tayyip Erdogan declared
that the extreme-left terrorist group DHKP-C had claimed
responsibility for the death of Burak Can Karamanoglu. In this
way, the PM is directly appealing to his grassroots supporters
intimating that the ones responsible for the hapless boy Burak
Can Karamanoglu's death are the ‘Revolutionary People’s
Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C)’, one of those "the secular,
domestic groups who conduct acts of terror in the name of their
chosen cause; in this case, the explicit ideological pursuit is
the birth of a Marxist Turkey," as expressed by Kyle Brady,
Graduate Student at the Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA.

Last year during the Gezi protests, the PM also drew his
supporters' attention to numerous leftist organizations
participating and supporting the protests. The AKP's main support
after all consists of conservative Muslims traditionally opposed
to any politician or position left of center, in a real throwback
to Cold War politics. In addition, the memory of DHKP/C's deadly
attack on the Sabancı Towers in Levent (Istanbul) on January 9,
1996, still lingers prominently in the Turkish population's
collective memory.

On the other hand, critics of Erdogan point to one of the PM's
now-notorious television appearances last year. As his ally
Mohammad Morsi was being deposed by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi, the 17-year old Asmaa Al-Beltaji was shot and killed on
the Rabea Al Adaweya square in Cairo during the army's attempts
to disperse a six-week-old sit-in by force (August 14, 2013). The
dead girl was a daughter of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed
Al-Beltaji, one of Egypt's first-ever democratically-elected
leaders.

Appearing on Turkish television after this tragic event, Erdogan
read a letter written by the girl to her father. While reading
her words, the Turkish PM was unable to contain himself and burst
into tears, explaining afterwards that he was reminded of a note
written by his own daughter when he was facing jail time. Now,
his opponents question the prime minister's loyalties, indulging
in public displays of grief over a dead Egyptian girl, but
remaining silent in the face of the Turkish boy Berkin Elvan's
equally tragic death.

Swimming against the tide

Protests in support of Berkin Elvan have spread throughout
Turkey, transcending confessional lines and income barriers. The
boy belonged to the Alevi minority in Turkey and was a member of
Turkey's low-income social classes. Turkey’s Alevi (or Turkey's
very own Alawite variety of Islam) community is estimated to
consist of 15 to 20 million members and their creed is very
unlike the strict Sunni Islam (pertaining to the Hanafi madhhab
or school of law) advocated by the PM and the AKP. Even Turkey's
universally-loved pop star Sezen Aksu, a woman well-known for her
personal piety and sympathetic stance toward the AKP government,
has now come out in support of Berkin Elvan, having penned a
heartfelt letter posted on her personal website. Other supporters
launched a crowd funding campaign online in order to be able to
honor Berkin Elvan with a full-page obit in the New York Times.
The targeted goal of raising $57,000 was easily reached in just
over one day and "Berkin’s commemoration will be published by
the New York Times on Friday, March 14, 2014".

In the end, it seems that the beleaguered prime minister really
seems have his work cut out now if he wants to hang on to power
in the coming months. Opposition to his rule has now reached
truly global proportions. Last January, the "outspoken Israel
Lobbyists" Morton Abramowitz, Eric Edelman and Blaise
Misztal penned a letter in the Washington Post which, according
to the well-known whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, was a clear appeal
to "the Obama Administration to overthrow the current Turkish
administration," led by Tayyip Erdogan.

The Washington Post missive ends with this ominous paragraph:
"Erdogan is doing great harm to Turkey’s democracy. The
United States should make clear, privately and publicly, that his
extreme actions and demagoguery are subverting Turkey’s political
institutions and values and endangering the US-Turkey
relationship."

In the end, one can but wonder about such claims and their
relationship to reality. After all, the PM himself is always
blaming outside forces for his woes, giving them ever more
colorful names, from the "Interest Rate Lobby" to more
recently a "Robot Lobby" using the social networking
site Twitter for nefarious ends. Against this backdrop, the
Hizmet Movement led by Fethullah Gülen has also recently declared
its support for the opposition CHP or Republican People's Party.

Writing in the Gülen-affiliated daily Zaman, the journalist Şahin
Alpay announced his decision to cast his ballot for the
opposition setting an example for his readers who are more likely
than not to heed the words of their ‘master lord’, the
self-exiled Fethullah Gülen.

The end of the month is now approaching with rapid steps and the
outcome of the local elections might just prove to be a sign of
things to come.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.